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Woodson a Reflection of His Famed Mentors

Eighteen summers ago, Mike Woodson was lured to Phoenix with the promise of brilliant blue skies, lush green fairways and a bottomless bucket of bright-white Titleists. He landed in a gymnasium, with a whistle in his mouth and a roster of N.B.A. rookies.

Coaching careers usually begin with some mix of ambition and intent. Woodson’s began with a double-cross, a mischievous misdirection play by his friend and mentor, Cotton Fitzsimmons.

Woodson, drafted as a scoring guard by the Knicks in 1980, had retired from basketball after a respectable 11-year career. He was happily building his real-estate portfolio in Indianapolis when Fitzsimmons — his former coach in Kansas City and Sacramento — asked him to help with the Suns’ summer-league team.

“You’d be an excellent coach,” Fitzsimmons told him.

“Absolutely not,” Woodson said.

The deal was closed when Fitzsimmons promised a week of golf. The ruse was exposed on Woodson’s first morning, when Fitzsimmons departed the gym with his golf bag and left Woodson in charge.

“He played golf every day,” Woodson recalled, his broad smile stretching his stern black goatee. “I coached them. I never got to play golf, not one time.”

In that week, the reluctant student would become an energized and demanding coach, launching a second career he never envisioned.

Nearly two decades later, Woodson, 54, is still coaching (well), golfing (badly) and summoning the lessons of his famed mentors — from Bob Knight to Red Holzman to Fitzsimmons to Larry Brown — while embracing the greatest challenge of his career: steadying a perpetually wobbly Knicks franchise.

The Knicks are 8-1 since Woodson replaced Mike D’Antoni as the head coach. They have crushed the Indiana Pacers, outhustled the Philadelphia 76ers and humiliated the Orlando Magic and pushed their way over .500 (26-25) for the first time in two months.

The surge has burnished the reputation of Woodson, who spent a year out of the N.B.A. after being fired as head coach by the Atlanta Hawks in 2010. He makes his first return to Atlanta on Friday, as the Knicks take on a Hawks team now in sixth place in the Eastern Conference, two spots ahead of New York.

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Mike Woodson has led the Knicks to an 8-1 record since taking over from Mike D'Antoni, with hustle, accountability and shared responsibility new buzzwords in the locker room.Credit
Chris Chambers/Getty Images

The Knicks’ emerging personality is now a blend of D’Antoni’s kinetic offense, Woodson’s grinding half-court sets and a defensive grit rarely seen at Madison Square Garden since Jeff Van Gundy’s departure more than a decade ago.

“It’s no accident,” said Isiah Thomas, Woodson’s longtime friend and former teammate at Indiana University. “I think what we’re seeing is if Woodson gets the right pieces and players, he can do it.”

The new buzzwords in the Knicks’ locker room — hustle, accountability, shared responsibility — reflect the ethos of their new coach, and by extension the men who groomed him.

In his verbiage, Woodson sometimes assumes Brown’s philosopher-coach persona, speaking earnestly of “playing the right way” and the need to “teach” his players.

Though his Hawks playbook was derided as isolation-heavy, Woodson actually favors the share-the-ball mentality preached by Holzman. And off the court, Woodson radiates Fitzsimmons’s collegiality, with a far-reaching network of N.B.A. friends who praise his dedication, his passion, his sense of humor and his loyalty.

Woodson is the one who invites everyone to dinner on the road, who loans cuff links to forgetful staff members, who is the first to call when a friend has been fired.

“He’s just a really good, decent guy who respects the game and is loyal as hell and loves to coach and teach,” said Brown, who hired Woodson in Philadelphia (2001-3) and again in Detroit (2003-4, when the Pistons won the N.B.A. championship). “And he’s fun to be around.”

A devout Luddite, Woodson eschews e-mail and text messages, preferring a live voice to a keyboard. A gray Samsung flip-phone sits on his desk at the Knicks’ suburban training center. It vibrated a half-dozen times during a recent 30-minute interview.

At one end of the desk — the side most visible to visitors — sits a shiny, miniature version of the Larry O’Brien Trophy, given each year to the N.B.A. champion. A few inches to the left is a framed photo of Woodson’s wife, Terri, and their two daughters, Alexis and Mariah, both students at Georgia Tech.

In his year away from coaching, Woodson was a fixture at O’Keefe Gym, cheering on his daughters as they competed for the Yellow Jackets’ volleyball team. Woodson keeps another treasured photo, of himself and his 11 siblings, on his desk.

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Mike Woodson played only his rookie season for the Knicks. He had an 11-year N.B.A. career.Credit
George Kalinsky for Madison Square Garden

Born in 1958 in Indianapolis, Michael Dean Woodson was the second youngest in a close-knit clan, his childhood shaped by the family’s financial struggles and his parents’ fragile health. They moved several times, living in two- and three-bedroom homes that barely held the 14 of them.

Woodson’s father, Chester, worked two or three jobs at a time, delivering pianos, managing Laundromats and mowing lawns; he died of a heart attack when Woodson was 13.

“I just truly believe that he worked himself to death,” Woodson said.

After that, the family split up, to lessen the burden on Woodson’s mother, Odessa, a nurse. Woodson lived for a year with his oldest sister, Jan Davis, and her husband, Donald.

When Woodson moved back to his mother’s home, he and his siblings started working to help support her, “to make life good for her, the best we could.”

“I would pretty much give her half of my paycheck,” he said, “and I put the other half in my pocket, and life was good.”

After a standout career at Broad Ripple High School, Woodson said he had numerous offers to play for Division I programs. He chose Indiana University, a one-hour drive from home, in part to stay close to his family. His mother attended home games, but her mobility became limited by heart troubles and severe arthritis.

Eventually, the Knicks made Woodson the 12th pick in the 1980 draft. With his first N.B.A. contract in hand, he bought his mother a house — the first she had ever owned — a three-bedroom, two-bath home on a three-quarter-acre lot. He beams at the memory.

Meanwhile, Woodson’s N.B.A. career had a bumpy beginning. Holzman traded him after his rookie season to the Nets — where he played just seven games under Brown before being traded to the Kansas City Kings.

There, he found himself as a player. He swung between starter and sixth man in his five seasons with the Kings, averaging a career-high 18.2 points per game in 1982-83. “Great guy, great teammate, gave you everything he had,” said Frank Hamblen, a Kings assistant coach under Fitzsimmons.

But in August 1986, Woodson was traded to the Los Angeles Clippers. Odessa Woodson died that same month.

“She just didn’t really get to enjoy my N.B.A. success,” Woodson said. “That didn’t really sit well with me. You see a lot of N.B.A. guys that play and they get a chance to fly their mom around. She was never healthy enough to do that.”

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Mike Woodson coached the Atlanta Hawks for six seasons, taking them to the playoffs three times.Credit
Mark J. Terrill/Associated Press

The Indianapolis roots resonate in every sentence, as Woodson’s slight drawl turns “forum” into “farm” and “toilet” into “tawlet.” In high school, Woodson played with “a humble toughness,” in the words of his former teammate Jerry Cox.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen Mike get in a fight in his life,” Cox said. “I’ve seen him hold his own. I’ve seen him not back down. But he’s always been under control.”

Back then, Woodson was part of a group of high school, college and N.B.A. players who played in summer pickup games around town. George McGinnis, the former Pacer, recalled Woodson having “a real nice, classic jump shot” and a rail-thin frame. They dubbed him Stickman.

At Indiana University, Woodson was a big-time scorer, averaging 19.8 points in four years. He was also a true Knight disciple, serious-minded and stern.

“He made sure that we did the things that Coach Knight wanted done, on and off the court,” said Thomas, who was a freshman when Woodson was a senior. That included making sure players attended class, made it to practice on time and participated in preseason workouts.

“There was no questioning Mike,” Thomas said. “At that time, he was the leader. And he led.”

Around the N.B.A., Woodson is universally known as “Woody,” although a few other nicknames have come and gone.

On the golf course, he is fond of calling himself Tiger Woodson, a moniker that elicits howls from his golfing partners. (“More like Barkley Woodson,” Brown said.)

In January 2010, Hawks players and staff members dubbed their coach Mr. Potato Head, after Woodson’s eyebrows mysteriously disappeared. (The phenomenon has never been explained; some speculate that Woodson, an avid cigar smoker, might have accidentally burned them off.) Woodson laughed along with his players.

The Hawks gave Woodson his first head-coaching chance, and he repaid them in kind, taking a young, unpolished team that won 13 games in his first season (2004-5) and building it into a solid playoff contender. The Hawks increased their win total every year he was there, peaking with a 53-29 record in 2009-10. But after a second consecutive second-round playoff ouster in 2010, the team declined to renew his contract.